“Good for me to Leave it for Good”: A Longitudinal Study on How Emotion Labor in Teaching Contributes to a Beginning EFL Teacher's Resignation

Abstract

Seldom have studies linked the early-career teacher attrition problem to teachers' emotion labor, especially with a longitudinal design. Grounded in the poststructural approach, we designed a longitudinal study to investigate qualitatively how a second-year English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teacher's emotion labor triggered by implicit feeling rules contributed to her resignation. We interviewed the novice EFL teacher about her experiences of teaching practice and emotion labor. Findings revealed that: (1) The sources of feeling rules could be complex but were mainly institutional wills, professional norms, and social expectations; (2) many factors triggering emotion labor existed in educational institutions, indicating the necessity of institutional reform; (3) the long-term residual effects of emotion labor led to teacher attrition through the mediation of elevated burnout and decreased teacher wellbeing. Our study considers the teacher's resignation as her resistance to feeling rules and provides empirical evidence for the link between the power imbalance behind emotion labor and early-career resignation. These findings point to a possible need for institutional support and reform as effective methods to increase teachers' wellbeing and career longevity.